


Inauguration

by asoldandtrueasthesky



Category: Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:50:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asoldandtrueasthesky/pseuds/asoldandtrueasthesky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Romana has never hid her derision for the impractical Time Lord robes but there is one she doesn’t hate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inauguration

**Author's Note:**

> I had a strange and random idea about Presidential robes and this accidentally happened

The official Presidential robe, the one worn on only the most formal and important of occasions which was usually just the Inauguration (and so she had worn it more than the average President, with all the times she had lost and won the Presidency) was special. It was heavy and suffocating and long and impractical and so very _Gallifreyan_ but she could never hate it.  

It’s white, of course, the usual Chapter-neutral Presidential colour. The fabric is similar to that of any other Time Lord robe, albeit arbitrarily more expensive. What made it different was the pale gold embroidery, not set in any pattern but an echo of her worldline, the unique path she’d taken through the Universe, all her travels in space-time mapped out in gold. Because of that it changed each time she wore it, more travels, more memories impressed into fabric. Most Presidents who wore it had rather sparse embroidery, sometimes the flecks of gold barely noticeable at all but for her it filled itself with lines and curves, lines that ran into each other and ran parallel and antiparallel and doubled back on themselves in beautiful chaos.

She returns after years of imprisonment and the robe hangs off her fragile malnourished frame. The patterns are almost identical to the one she’d worn a lifetime ago but she finds it- a straight line that hadn’t been there before. It’s comforting, seeing that line of twenty years against lifetimes of happier days, of longer lines, but it doesn’t quite slow down the frantic beating of her hearts.

The next time she sees it it again feels like a lifetime has passed- she’d started and won a war, watched her planet chase itself to destruction and tried to find a substitute, a new life with the only people she could allow herself to care about. Now exiled by Narvin, unknowingly acting out a play written by someone else, she can see the robe on her future self, etchings of journeys she hasn’t yet made. It’s only a replica, a prop, made of her memories, but she doesn’t know it then and it’s what gives her the idea when she pulls Leela away to run away to Paris, a Time Lord and a human exploring the Universe as it always should be.

All too soon she’s back in place, back on the real Gallifrey, _her_ Gallifrey, the Gallifrey she’d completely messed up. She barely has time to breathe before she’s shoehorned into the Presidency again which is painfully ironic- when she’d had it, when she’d wanted it, full of idealism and a burning belief that she could fix the dystopia she saw, she’d had to cling on to it with everything she had but even in a panopticon full of the powerhungry no one else wants to take the responsibility, no one else wants to face the crisis.

Even though there are more important things on her mind, thoughts of her friends stranded without her, thoughts of the Gallifrey she’d adopted being overrun by daleks, she can’t help but enjoy some of the ceremony, rushed as it might be there are some traditions that can never be ignored. The robe still hasn’t changed much but there are new lines that seem to have a direction that isn’t right, left, up, down or diagonal, fitting for travels between worlds, between corrupted timelines. Somehow, as cluttered as it seems there’s still space for new lines, more journeys. Maybe, she thinks, there’s still a little idealism left in her after all.


End file.
